


Twilight and Evening Bell

by onstraysod



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Body Horror, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Insanity, One Shot, Prompt Fill, This is NOT a fix-it fic, a fic about the chains, and I'm sorry, yes those chains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 06:56:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20560097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onstraysod/pseuds/onstraysod
Summary: Edward Little would be no pile of sun-bleached bones scattered by the wind: Poseidon had decreed it.





	Twilight and Evening Bell

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt _[He wore ocean diamonds in his ears](https://pinespittinink.tumblr.com/post/185590810312/sensory-prompts)_
> 
> Title from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar"

Poseidon himself had come ashore to bedeck him, draping ropes of gold and pearl and rarer gems about his head and face. It was an act of obeisance and didn’t that make Edward nobility of some kind, a king of the polar shore? But no… something was wrong. Maybe he was misremembering. Yards away from where he sat, the sea was still locked beneath layers of ice, and even a god could not have burst through such a barrier without making an unholy racket. Yet all the sound Edward could remember hearing, for years and years past - as far back as his boyhood, maybe - was the howling of the wind, and the frail rattling whimpers rising from the prone bodies around him, the bodies of animals that had once been his men.

Still, he’d seen Poseidon - it could have been no other - standing bent over him, hoary beard and trident, black gums and missing teeth. There had been a fire burning, a pot bubbling over its flame, the smell of seared flesh heavy in the makeshift tent, and Edward had mumbled feeble protests: this was not the way of gentlemen, of officers. _You’re the last one of ‘em left_, Poseidon had leered, breath like the stench of a beached whale carcass blown into Edward’s face; _too good for the likes of you, is it, our meat? Aye, aye, lieutenant: let’s make you look more like an officer again, let’s pin summat better than epaulettes on you_. Links of gold had sparkled in the white sunlight - a watch chain, maybe - and Poseidon had seized hold of Edward’s head, and the point of a knife had pierced one cheek, then the other, and the chain had been threaded roughly through the gaps. _There you go, sir_, Poseidon had cried with a harsh bark of laughter, the edges of his form blurring as Edward’s vision reeled with unbearable pain.

Not quite unbearable. As he lay, head pillowed on broken shale, fingertips red and sticky from probing at his face, Edward recognized the gift. The god of the sea had provided for his rest. Vaguely he recalled a story he’d heard in the Mediterranean: if so warm and placid a sea had ever actually existed outside his imagination. An old tar had told how pirates, back in their lost golden age, had paid for the decent burial of their bodies by attaching doubloons to their persons, so whether marooned or shipwrecked, washed up on some foreign shore, the universal language of treasure would see them laid peacefully in the grave. Edward Little would be no pile of sun-bleached bones scattered by the wind: Poseidon had decreed it.

Treasure lay strewn across the rocks, atop piles of broadcloth and wasted flesh. Edward crawled on all fours, collecting gold chains and earrings, brass and bone buttons, medals and pins. On a man without a face or hands he found a sailmaker’s needle, and this he drove into his face in two dozen places: through eyebrows and nostrils, through lips and earlobes. He made at least five more holes in each cheek. And sitting, swaying to the wind and the words of a shanty he half-remembered, half made up - a suitably piratical ode to pillaging and rum - he strung his face with ornaments, a sea chest’s worth of pilfered loot to pay the gravedigger’s fee.

The pain was a point of bright, burning light in the middle distance, blinding for a moment but fading quickly, like the faces of men he’d once known. They were bits and pieces now, nameless and no longer whole: square jaw, dark curls, green eyes like a shallow coral sea; and they blended one into another until they formed a single composite man, a mariner, beckoning from the shore. Edward lost his sense of delicacy, and as he threaded gold through his flesh, he broke an arm bone in half and sucked out the marrow. What did it matter now? His rank, _his nature as a gentleman_, was clearly proclaimed by the wealth that dangled from his skin.

The wind whistled; no more whimpers came from the mean things sprawled on the shale. Edward looked up, saw the mariner gesturing to him, a slender jolly boat drawn up at his side on the rocks. He shook his head at the man - he would wait a bit longer - the movement causing the ornaments on his face to jingle softly, a strange discordant harmony. It comforted him, this reminder of the bounty in gold he would deliver up to Charon when he was finally ready to be ferried across.


End file.
